"Real" Student View

[cesbrandt]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For details, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-08-12). 

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Okay, so the title could use some work, sorry about that.

Alright, so the basic idea is that the Student View be expanded to emulate a legitimate account with no special permissions. Now, within Canvas, the current option is fairly accommodating, but it is troublesome when dealing with external tools that are reliant upon additional information that is not generated for the current Student View system.

For example, Chalk & Wire Learning Assessment uses the e-mail address of the user to create or access the account-level intended for that user. This is troublesome for testing due to the need to masquerade or login as a student account, separate our actual accounts. Of course, for administrators, this isn't a horrible setback, but for teachers demonstrating how-to use the external tool to their class don't have the luxury of accessing other user accounts. As a result, they must "borrow" a student account to perform their demonstrations.

As external tools come in all shapes and sizes, I am pushing forward the idea of expanding the Student View to emulate a full user to avoid encountering similar issues that may occur with other external tools that require different information that isn't created in the Student View.

[LindsayWatts]

Yes! I am having trouble finding a way to actually understand what the students are viewing when I embed a google doc, because it won't allow me to view it in Student View. I teach second graders and often need to make a video in Student View to guide them on how to complete assignments, but I am not able to do that because it acts as if I have no Google permissions.